About

One of the most frequently used features of an IDE is find/replace and search features. Even though the search facilities, especially find/replace features in Eclipse are adequate for most developers, there are still plenty of usability issues and enhancement requests arising in Bugzilla. This project aims to fix a few of these usability issues.

Primary Goals

General Goal

Unifying "Search" facilities so that there won't be 3 different search (and replace) functionalities in Eclipse

Specific Goals

Unifying Ctrl+F (Find/Replace dialog) and Ctrl+J (Incremental Search) by mostly behaving like Ctrl+J. Providing better UI utilization by not showing modal dialogs if the user doesn't request wider options. Summary of the idea: Firefox-style "Find" with enhancements. = a lightweight Find/Replace. Our main goal here is providing all functionality available in Ctrl+F with this lightweight Find/Replace. Here's the related Bugzilla entry: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=99294

Providing "bridges" between Ctrl+F and Ctrl+H. This means carrying query information and search parameters back and forth between them when it's possible. --- To explain it better, it doesn't mean "sharing" input/settings, it is enabling the user to transfer "Find/Replace" input/settings to "Search" easily and extend his/her current search scope & query.

Investigate better presentation of the search results in Ctrl+H ( adding an alternative view like Problems view - results in a table - might be a good idea to show result lines and numbers, paths etc. )

Secondary Goals

Solving usability issues

A few of the following ideas are already a part of the specific project goals above.

Ctrl-J to global search: transform a Ctrl-J to to a global search actually, drive all searches from the keyboard incremental search would be good: there should be a set of keyboard shortcuts on Ctrl-J to set up a complete search, and then execute it globally.

2 - Display search results. the view that displays the search results is very poor currently. Probably a tree view is not perfect. It should show the matches, for example. It should have more shortcuts...

3 - Improve the search dialog (Ctrl+H). More TBD

Would it make sense to always display the last search when opening the dialog ?

Not only should it be possible to remember the results of previous searches, but also be possible to refine (edit the criteria, etc) and re-run them

Usability: it is not clear how the search/replace works (what does it apply to ? What is the "Stale matches" dialog ?

User Interface quality: accessing search/replace is a modal dialog (modal dialog are never very good) that is accessed from another modal dialog (idem). Which means that the user need to complete multiple step, with complex UI, to access a functionality that's a basic Editor functionality. At least, for example, "Search/Replace" should appear in the "Search" menu, as usual most tools

Patches "org.eclipse.ui.workbench.texteditor" in order to replace "Incremental Find"s Label widget with a Text widget. This Text widget is capable of accepting cut/copy/paste events. This patch is currently experimental (partially breaks Incremental Find features).